1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to devices used for reading and transmitting biomedical data over the telephone.
2. Description of Prior Art
Patients with specific health conditions may require constant supervision and examination by their physicians or health technicians. However, getting oneself to a hospital or clinic may be impossible, impractical or inconvenient. In addition the use of remote monitoring of the patient by the health care provider is becoming increasingly more common. The remote monitoring of EKG signals has been practice for many years. The prior art includes biomedical devices that allow a patient to perform biomedical readings upon himself or herself and transmit these readings over the telephone.
In conducting these self-readings, it is often important to apply the reader or sensor in the proper place and in the proper manner. The conventional remote monitoring EKG device is comprised of a plurality of skin electrodes that are wired into a transmitter box which has an acoustic coupler provided in its top surface. The handset of the phone through which the EKG signals are being transmitted to a receiving unit at the hospital or physician's office is placed into a receiver cradle on the top of the transmitter box. In the conventional acoustic coupling device, the patient and the technician cannot speak to or hear each other during the interval in which the reading occurs, because the handset is intimately coupled to the acoustic coupler on the top of the transmitter box. A slight misconfiguration or bodily movement after a proper configuration may upset the readings and render the results useless.
In such a case, the patient must make and transmit the reading over again. Typically, what occurs is that the initial few electrode placements are faulty and the receiving technician attempts to get the patient's attention by shouting over the phone in the hope of being heard from the phone's earpiece lying on top of the acoustic coupler. Eventually, the patient realizes that the placements are faulty either by hearing the technician's loud yelling, or by speaking to the technician after a faulty test has been completed. When a sampling takes several minutes to take and transmit, this can be an exasperating experience for both the patient and the health care provider. This is particularly true since many of the patients using such devices are elderly and are intimated or confused by the monitoring procedure and equipment. Thus, it would be advantageous to provide a device that allows the patient and technician to talk to each other as the reading occurs in order to minimize errors and save time.
The prior art discloses an apparatus and a method for concurrent communication of medical patient data and voice (Saltzstein, U.S. Pat. No. 5,704,364). However, such an apparatus is expensive and complex for it requires the patient to have a life signs monitor, a digital simultaneous voice and data (DSVD) device, and a modem. Furthermore, the receiving party must also have a DSVD device and a modem. Both the apparatus and method are complex for they involve multiple series of digitizing, undigitizing, modulating, and demodulating.
Therefore, what is needed is an inexpensive and simple telephone device that allows a patient to conduct self-readings while simultaneously being able to talk and hear. A telephone apparatus with less devices and components will simplify the process of taking self-measurements as well as lower the cost of manufacturing such an apparatus.
What is also needed is a method for simultaneously transmitting biomedical readings and human voice over a telephone.